Frankfurt Bookfair 2008 Roundup
-- Publishers Weekly, 9/24/2008 9:06:00 AM
Click the headline below to skip directly to that article.
Frankfurt Deals Report: The British Leading the Charge
Impelsys Has New Service; CCC Adds to Rightslink
‘Ruby’s Spoon’ to S&G
Paulo Coelho’s Frankfurt Moment
Pushing a Self-Published Book at Frankfurt
Debut Novels Gain Momentum
Frankfurt Quiet, But Not Dead
Serendipitous Success for Kogan Page
More Deals Trickling Out of Frankfurt
Rights Guides
Frankfurt Deals Report: The British Leading the Charge
By Rachel Deahl & Liz Thomson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/15/2008 5:22:00 AM
It's the British who are grabbing the spotlight at Frankfurt right now. Although the rights tent has yet to buzz about the book of the fair, two major deals are currently underway for novels by U.K. authors. The first buzz-worthy deal is for a book called Heresy by S.J. Parriss that is currently on auction in the U.K. with two high six figures offers on the table. Rep'd by Curtis Brown, the novel, which is set in the late 1500's in England and is the first in a planned series, follows a "renegade monk" who stumbles on a series of murders at the University of Oxford while working undercover there (in the Queen's service) to foil Catholic assassination schemes being hatched against the monarch. Parriss is a pseudonym for Stephanie Merritt, who's written two novels published by Faber as well as the memoir The Devil Within.
CB is pitching the novel as a work "in the mold of C.J. Samson with hints of The Name of the Rose." According to an agent from CB, the book has turned out to be a "little surprise" for the agency; it came in, as a partial manuscript, only last Friday. Although the U.K. deal will likely close before the Fair, the U.S. deal is expected to close afterwards. (Jonny Geller is handling the book in the U.K. and Jennifer Joel, at ICM, is handling U.S. rights.)
The other big U.K. deal, from Janklow & Nesbit, is for a novel called Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni. Tina Bennett, working from New York, has sold the book for a large (but still undisclosed) sum, to the Random House U.K. imprint Chatto. Lucie Whitehouse, who's handling translation rights, said she's been getting inundated with requests on the manuscript. More details to come on the book and the U.K. deal.
In another deal involving Chatto, Chatto and Knopf acted in concert to acquire “a perfect new novel by the incomparable Anne Tyler”. Noah's Compass concerns a year in the life of 61-year-old a man “let go” from his school teaching job, who downsizes to a tiny out-of-town apartment, where he goes to bed early and alone on the first night wakes up in hospital. It's about memory and loss of memory, about incidents, family relationships and a late flowering love. Chatto’s Alison Samuel describes Noah’s Compass as “enchanting, heartbreaking and full of surprises.” The agent is Tim Seldes at Russell & Volkening.
Nicholas Pearson of Fourth Estate has acquired U.K. rights to Michael Cunningham’s new novel, buying British/Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Bill Hamilton at A M Heath. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in the U.S., where Cunningham is agented by Gail Hochman.
Michael Flamini of St. Martin’s Press, has pre-empted The Boy from Baby House 10 by Alan Philps and John Lahutsky in a major deal for world rights from Annabel Merullo at PFD in London. It is John Lahutsky’s inspiring true story, written by Philps, the former foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph, of being born premature in Russia, consigned to an almost certain death amid the deplorable conditions of the Russian orphanage system and rescued by a single mother in the U.S. who gave him a home and helped him to grow into a successful American high school student.
Joel Rickett, former deputy editor of the Bookseller, has made his first acquisitions for Viking U.K. Binge Trading by Seth Freedman is an insider account of City greed, corruption and excess. Freedman is a stockbroker-turned -writer who is now a frequent contributor to the Guardian and his book describes the addictive experience of risking millions every day, and the after-hours bingeing that inevitably follows. UK/Commonwealth rights were bought from Mal Peachey at Essential Works. Rickett has also bought The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman, a Wall Street Journal columnist. It centers on John Paulson who made $15 billion by betting against the housing bubble. A gripping story of the current crisis from an American point of view, it features a cast of characters who risk billions on the markets. The agent was Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein – Viking has UK/Commonwealth rights. “Obviously every publisher is now scrambling for finance and business books,” said Rickett. “Both Binge Trading and The Greatest Trade Ever are powerful, personalized stories by well-placed writers.”
Impelsys Has New Service; CCC Adds to Rightslink
By Craig Morgan Teicher and Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 10/15/2008 8:09:00 AM
Two technology-oriented organizations used the Frankfurt Book Fair to make new announcements.
Impelsys, a provider of electronic content delivery solutions, whose clients include Houghton Mifflin, Elsevier and McGraw-Hill, unveiled iPublish Central, a self-serve digital publishing, marketing, warehousing and distribution platform. The system—accessible at www.ipublishcentral.com— enables publishers to register themselves online, upload text and multimedia book content, create and disseminate marketing tools such as widgets, manage and distribute content through a digital warehouse, and create Web sites and portals through which to sell e-books.
The system is divided into three components: Market (widgets and view-inside), Distribute (the digital warehouse, which will debut first quarter of 2009), and Deliver (Web portals). Other companies, such as LibreDigital and Ingram, offer these same services, but iPublish Central’s self-serve model enables the company to charge less. “The thing we’ve been trying to do all along is bring the cost down of online delivery,” said Samir Shariff, CEO of Impelsys.
Startup costs for a publisher wanting to digitize print content in iPublish are modest. For the Web-portals feature, there is a $5 per book per month fee, plus a transaction fee for each sale made through the portal. There will be a per-book hosting fee for the digital warehouse; it has not yet been determined, but according to the company’s press agent, “it will be low.” The widget and view-inside features are free.
Impelsys has been beta-testing the system with four publishers: MIT Press, The American College of Physicians, Benchmark Education, and comics publisher Valiant Entertainment. Impelsys chose these beta-testers to represent the various kinds of small publishers the company thinks will be most interested in iPublish Central. All four of their sites will go live Thursday.
“The Harpers and Random Houses of the world have the muscle to invest,” said Shariff. “What iPublish Central does is allows the publisher to experiment with different ways of marketing content online.”
It turns out that the chance to experiment is highly valued by some small publishers, at least according to Gita Manaktala, marketing director, books division at MIT Press: “Nobody really understands this market. It’s going to be up to us to decide how to price books and how to offer them to readers, and I think we’re going to learn a lot by trying different things. Our books are available electronically through content aggregators to the library market, but we haven’t sold e-books to consumers before, until recently when we started putting titles into the Kindle program. This is an opportunity to sell e-books to a much broader audience of readers."
Separately, the Copyright Clearance Center announced the signing of two new clients to its Rightslink service. Cambridge University Press and The Economist have both reached agreements with the CCC to use Rightslink, which gives publishers an online method to grant permission to reprint material for a licensing fee. Through Rightslink, readers click on a permissions link and are taken step-by-step through the permission process. The CCC’s Jake Kelleher said STM publishers and major university presses currently comprise the core group of Rightslink members, with CUP joining such publishers as Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis and the University of Chicago Press. Newspapers that are using the service include The New York Times, USA Today and Dow Jones.
'Ruby's Spoon' to S&G
by Matthew Thornton -- Publishers Weekly, 10/15/2008 11:07:00 AM
Ruby’s Spoon, a debut novel byAnna Lawrence Pietroni that has generated much buzz in Frankfurt, will be published in the U.S. by Spiegel & Grau with Juile Grau besting two other bidders for U.S. rights. Chatto & Windus took U.K. rights in a heated auction on the eve of the fair. Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit handled both sales.
The novel, set in 1930s England in a landlocked industrial town still haunted by the Great War, focuses on the motherless thirteen-year-old Ruby, whose dreams of escaping her claustrophobic home may be realized with the arrival of a charismatic and mysterious white-haired woman from the coast; meanwhile, the tight-knit women of the community come to see the outsider as the cause of the town’s accelerating misfortunes. The book has drawn comparisons to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, and, more recently, the writing of Sarah Waters. Pietroni, an Oxford graduate with a Master’s degree in children’s literature, is also a former prison warden. Spiegel & Grau will publish in 2010, coordinating with Chatto’s publication that spring.
Paulo Coelho's Frankfurt Moment
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2008 3:15:00 AM
The Wednesday of the Frankfurt Book Fair, in many ways, belonged to Paulo Coelho. The Brazilian author was the man of the hour at both the opening of the day's event and its close, being feted in a party hosted by his American publisher, HarperCollins. Coelho, whose work has been translated in more than 66 languages and who boasts over 4 million copies sold of his most popular title alone (The Alchemist), kicked off the Fair's opening press conference by dissecting his bullish attitude on digitzation and the power of free material on the Web. It was, as Coelho noted in his speech, a pirated version of The Alchemist that appeared in Russia in 1999 that gave the author a huge boost in the country. After its appearance, Coelho said his sales jumped from 1,000 copies sold to 10,000 in year. Today, Coelho's sales in Russia top out over 10 million.
Coelho, who told PW he spends nearly three hours a day responding to reader e-mail and blogging on paulocoelhoblog.com, has embraced both staying connected to his readers online and giving them content for free. (At the HC party, which was sponsored by BMW, TVs ran loops of photos of Coelho fans, all of whom had e-mailed the author shots of themselves holding one of his books.) Is this a solution for all authors? Clearly not. And Coelho admitted in his speech that he doesn't ultimately know how the book business can embrace the power of the Internet while leveraging its longevity. Nonetheless he's seen the digital light. "The Internet has taught me this: don't be afraid of sharing your ideas. Don't be afraid of engaging others to voice their ideas. And more importantly, don't presume who is and who is not a creator--because we all are."
This attitude was rewarded on Wednesday night as Coelho, who was joined by Fair-goers and his lengthy list of foreign publishers, from houses in Beirut to Barceona to Bangkok.
Pushing a Self-Published Book in Frankfurt
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2008 3:57:00 AM
Although it's not generating the kind of buzz that comes with reports of six and seven figure offers, a new self-published biblical novel, being shopped by Robert Gottlieb at Trident, is one of the interesting books coming out of the rights tent. The Lost Epistle of Jesus, which Gottlieb signed just before the Fair, was written by Evan Drake Howard, a Rhode Island-based Baptist minister with his own church. Gottlieb, who said the book is just on submission in the U.S. with roughly nine houses reading the manuscript, has already sold rights in Brazil and has "serious interest" from publishers in France, Germany and Spain.
Howard, who's published a number of nonfiction books with religious houses like Judson Press and Augsberg Fortress, managed to sell thousands of copies of Epistle after listing the book on Amazon. (This clearly grabbed the attention of Gottlieb, who received the manuscript unsolicited.) At one point the book, which is about a love affair between Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Judas, hit #2 on Amazon's Biblical bestseller list.
Although Gottlieb declined to discuss a potential (or wishful) purchase price for the novel, the self-published phenom remains a constant in the business with several titles trickling up a year. Could Epistle be the next Lace Reader or, more likely, something along the lines of the Hachette-acquired and originally self-published Christian bestseller The Shack? Gottlieb certainly knows the appeal to publishers (and the media) of the self-published author; the platform, as he said, can be "a great way to start a writer."
Debut Novels Gain Momentum
by Matthew Thornton -- Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2008 12:31:00 PM
Dial Press has won North American rights to Tom Rachman’s buzzed-about debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Susan Kamil topped seven other publishers with a significant six-figure offer(agent Susan Golomb had seven bidders total, with two imprints making a house bid) in an auction that kicked off on Tuesday and was remarkably speedy given that some participants, or those bidders’ bosses, are in Frankfurt. Dial’s pub date is likely to be fall 2009 or early 2010. The novel hasn’t sold in other territories yet, though foreign publishers may have been waiting to see how the North American auction played out.
Another first novel that is gaining traction at the fair is Patrick Lane’s Red Dog, Red Dog. The book is currently on submission in the U.S., but agent Dean Cooke reports that there is now a UK offer on the table from a “very prestigious” publisher, and the novel went in a preempt to Signatuur in Holland and at auction to Gallimard in France just before the fair began. Published this month in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, the story of two brothers with a painful past and secrets to keep was long-listed for the Giller Prize and is nominated for the Writer’s Trust Award.
Frankfurt Quiet, But Not Dead
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 10/15/2008 8:48:00 AM
Necessities, and not luxuries, is how Frankfurt Book Fair director Jurgen Boos characterized books at the opening press conference on Tuesday. Whether books are, in fact, "resistant to economic cycles of boom and bust," as Boos put it, is certainly the question percolating in Germany. Is this a slow Frankfurt? (According to stats from the Fair exhibitor attendance is down slightly from last year, from 7,448 total exhibitors in 2007 to 7,373 this year while agency attendance is up, from 471 last year to 510 this year.) Is the so-called economic crisis already having a ripple effect on sales and acquisitions? A number of agents said the Fair, while quiet, is still yielding plenty of business.
The offers, according to Sarah Nundy of Andrew Nurnberg, are still coming in, if "more cautiously." Robert Gottlieb, of Trident Media, said he thinks publishers are particularly interested in new material, in manuscripts that started circulating at (or just before) the Fair. Nonetheless, Gottlieb agreed with Nundy, saying that people are still buying "but they're being careful."
Neil Olson, of Donadio & Olson, said he's been pleasantly surprised that the tenor isn't worse; he said he expected the Fair to be "dead and full of fear and loathing" given the economic conditions, but that it's been far less glum than he anticipated.
Tracy Fisher, of William Morris, who was high on the fact that Aravind Adiga was just named the winner of the Booker Prize (he's an agency client), said she senses that the rights tent is a bit less crowded this year. Morris added that, even if it's not the thing dictating all the business decisions, the economic crisis is what's on everyone's mind; "people are skittish and being cautious."
For one agent, though, a slower Fair isn't necessarily a bad thing. Ira Silverberg, of Sterling Lord, said he's been "busy" so far after closing a major deal before the Fair—he made a six figure foreign sale for Adam Haslett's untitled debut novel (a follow-up to his award-winning debut short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here). In Silverberg's mind the industry's woes are, in part, tied to over-spending on so-called "big books" from prior Frankfurts so,if people are approaching deals more cautiously and intelligently, all the better.
Serendipitous Success for Kogan Page
by Liz Thomson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2008 8:02:00 AM
A missed meeting at the London offices of Saatchi & Saatchi led to a deal for a previously self-published book that appears poised to achieve international success. Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success is by Dan Hill, founder and president of Sensory Logic, a scientific, research-based consultancy specializing in gauging and helping companies' sensory-emotional connection with consumers.
A frequent speaker at business conventions, Hill has spent much of the year as an in-demand TV commentator decoding the emotions and the emotional intelligence of the various primary season candidates. He is now doing the same for the Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin tickets in the final run-up to the election.
All of which should stand him in good stead come January, when London-based business publisher Kogan Page publishes Emotionomics, which had already sold 4,000 copies in a self-published edition by the time KP senior publisher Jon Finch made the author's acquaintance as they each awaited a meeting with a Saatchi exec who was fog-bound in Manchester.
"We got talking and I realized immediately that I was on to something," Finch said at Frankfurt, where his colleague, Patricia Seibel, rights and digital sales manager, has been busy with deals and potential deals. Korean and Complex Chinese rights have been sold, and offers have been tabled from Russia, Turkey, Holland, France and Brazil. Kogan Page will publish the book in the US, where Keith Ashfield and Beatriz Casoy, who market the KP list, are reporting very significant interest in the title.
The book carries endorsements by management guru Tom Peters and Saatchi CEO Keith Roberts and has a foreword by Sam Simon, co-creator of The Simpsons.
More Deals Trickling Out of Frankfurt
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 10/17/2008 1:33:00 AM
After a relatively strong start to deal-making on Wednesday, action in the rights center slowed considerably Thursday and Friday. As has become almost standard practice, some of the smaller agencies said they hadn't closed any deals at the Fair, but were optimistic that the groundwork done at Frankfurt would pay off in the near future. Still, with thousands of agents and editors in attendance, deals did get done.
Betsy Robbins, at Curtis Brown, is buzzing about David Engleman's Sum which will be released in the U.S. from Pantheon in January. The book, which is "40 imagined tales of what the afterlife could be like," is the first trade title from Engleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor who's written a number of academic books, and has been sold in Holland and Germany so far. Robbins said that Jamie Byng, who bought the book for Canongate, has been a helpful evangelist, excitedly pitching it to other foreign editors.
Robert Gottlieb has gotten some more nibbles, and one big bite, on the Russian fantasy series he told PW about before the Fair. The trilogy, from Russian bestseller Alexey Pehov, has sold in a six figure deal to S&S UK; Ian Chapman made the buy and the British plan to follow the American publishing schedule. (Tor is publishing stateside.) As of this writing there were potential deals brewing in Germany, Holland and France, as well.
Ira Silverberg, who closed a big deal for Adam Haslett pre-Fair, also took on foreign rights for the Jack Kerouac estate and has been in talks about a number of international projects for the Beat author.
Neil Olson at Donadio & Olson has been closing deals all Fair on the latest from Chuck Palahnuik, Pymgy. The manuscript, which came in "a few weeks ago," has already sold in Italy. Olson has also been pleasantly surprised by the interest in a pseudonymous Mario Puzo pulp novel he's been selling called Six Graves to Munich. The paperback original has sold in the UK and Poland and, although Olson wasn't planning on making a deal for the now-out-of-print title in the U.S. that may change since "there's interest."
Tracy Fisher at William Morris has been dealing with a number of foreign offers on the screenplay from Quentin Tarantino, Inglorious Bastards. The controversial pic about a gang of Jewish-American soldiers who go on a gory Nazi killing spree during WWII is just going into production--Tarantino arrived in Berlin this week to start filming--is the subject of potential deals in France, Italy, Spain and Brazil. The U.S. deal for the script should close, per Fisher, before the end of the Fair. Fisher also has some new foreign deals for Jean Kwok's Goddess of Infinite Faces; the book, which sold to Riverhead in the U.S. has closed in Holland and Italy and offers are in from houses in Germany, Brazil and Israel. Fisher has also accepted a German preempt on Me and Miss M, a novel "in the vein of The Devil Wears Prada" by Brit Jemma Forte about a young Londoner who becomes the assistant of a demanding Hollywood actress appearing in a West End production. (The book is due out in the U.K. in September 2009 and will be submitted to U.S. houses after the Fair.)
And, in case you thought there weren't any Americans from big houses buying at the Fair, Carrie Kania has purchased Ten Storey Long Song by Richard Milward. Kania, who said the book is about "sex, drugs, rock and roll and Francis Bacon," nabbed the book from Jason Cooper at Faber & Faber. (Milward's first book, the 2007 paperback original Apples, was published by Canongate U.S.)
Peter McGuigan at Foundry Media talked about a number of offers that have come in on the agency's big book of the Fair, the novel Adopting Adults by Randy Susan Meyers. Forthcoming from St. Martin's in the U.S.--pub date is Jan '09--the book is a "domestic drama" told from the perspective of two sisters that witnessed their father kill their mother. Foundry has closed on a deal in Germany and has offers in from publishers in the U.K., Australia, Holland. (Potential deals also brewing in France, Spain and Italy.)
Chad Post at Open Letter closed on a deal for two books by Quim Monzo, Gasoline and Guadalajara. Monzo is a Catalan author and spoke at the opening press conference for the Fair last year. Post is about to make an offer on three books by the (recently deceased) Argentine author Juan Jose Saer.
Atlantyca Entertainment has licensed English-language rights to four books in Italian author Pierdomenico Baccalario’s Century series, published in Italy by Edizioni Piemme. Jim Thomas, editorial director at Random House Books for Young Readers, acquired the books—about four children who are chosen to complete missions “to settle an important legendary and vital pact between man and nature”—from Atlantyca, which has licensed the series in 10 countries to date. Random House is scheduled to publish the first book in the series in fall 2009.
Click the links below to view rights guides from publishers and agents attending the Frankfurt Book Fair Agate Publishing
Chronicle Books
Counterpoint/ Soft Skull Press
Davies Black Publishing
Diane Banks Associates
The Dijkstra Agency
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Free Spirit Publishing
Grove/ Atlantic
HarperCollins
Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency
KT Literary
Mendel Media Group
MFA Publications
Peter Riva
Rodale
Simon & Schuster
The Spitzer Agency
Sterling Lord
The Waxman Agency
Wylie Agency
A.P. Watt
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